Writer’s block

It’s been long since my last post. I was busy with other things and, to tell you the truth, i haven’t find anything to write about.

Let me explain this a bit. When i started this blog my intention was to write about solutions. Color management was a grateful issue. The idea is simple yet the implementation is very complicated. I tried to synthesize all the information i found on the web and in books, and write a guide that has the necessary technical background, but in the same time is easily understandable. I don’t know if i succeded or not, but the articles were read quite a few times.

And that is what i tried to do with other things as well. The geotagging, and the panorama posts were not howto-s, but rather reviews or short guides. I don’t want to write howto-s or step by step tutorials for certain software, becasue i neither like to read nor to write them. Naturally i read them sometimes when i’m searching for a solution to a particular problem, but i better like to explore things myself. (Beseides, a month ago i found Joel Cornuz’s blog, who is writing excellent howto-s and application reviews reguarly, about just the same software i would write about, if i would.)

My intention was to guide the attention of the interested people to certain areas and let them find the solution that fit them best by themselves.

But on the other hand i can only write about things that interests me. The problem occured when i tried to port my workflow to linux. My former workflow consisted of theese few steps: selection, metadata-editing, developing, rating, cataloging, archiving and printing. On linux i only found a few suitable software for selecting and developing. I googled a while for finding software for the above mentioned tasks, but failed.

My cataloging and archiving method relies on metadata. When i wanted to find a certain photo, i entered a few keywords, people i was looking for, event, or whatever. So what i was looking for is a metadata-editor that focuses on IPTC and XMP, and can handle DNG files, has a gui and shows at least thumbnails. Further i was looking for a cataloging application, that is customizable, focuses on IPTC and XMP metadata, can handle DNG files. And preferably theese two shall be separate applications.

I always enter metadata to the DNG-s, to avoid editing metadata twice (for original and derivative files). This is the first step (ok, the second, after trashing the photos that worth no more than that). So i was not able to port the first step. For developing raw files and postprocessing images there are quite a lot of applications, that would go easy, if i could overcome the first problem. Cataloging would be another hard issue i fear, but i nevert tried it yet, because how to catalog if there is no metadata?

This made me so dejected, i even made fewer photos lately (and even those are undeveloped yet). I only have hope on the next release of f-Spot and Digikam. Maybe, who knows. I love linux, but from a photographers point of view, the applications available are very few. This can be well understood. Developers are making software they are interested in (in general). This is why there are image-editors and -viewers, but no asset-management, or workflow software. The latter few are mainly used by professional photographer, who are unlikely to be developers (actually, this may not be true, for i am not a professional, but i use them, and so may be a lot of other people). I think that this situation will change, and in two years (i hope) there will be both sophisticated metadata-editors as well as asset-management applications.

Currently i am learning python and pyGtk in my spare time. That is the other reason for not writing to this blog. I want to develop a GUI wrapper for exiftool. If there is no application that suits my needs, than i have to write it myself. I have some programming knowledge (not much, unfortunately), and I am curious what i will be capable of. I don’t think that it will ever be a full featured product, as my goal is to make it capable to fit in my workflow, but i will upload the source, once there will be something to upload.

If i find anything interesting meanwhile, i will post about it. Hope it will be soon.